Sometime in the late ’80s, I was sharing some Iron City with my father at the bar of a Pittsburgh American Legion post. My dad served in World War II, on the destroyer escort Roche, in the North Atlantic and South Pacific. Prompted by the predominance of self-absorbed, career-drinking sixtysomethings around us, I asked, “When they let you out of the Navy, did anybody tell you what to say — warn you what you weren’t supposed to talk about?”

“No, they just gave us our discharge papers and told us to go home.”

“So what was it really like aboard ship? Were you afraid all the time?”

“Mostly, it was boring. There was nothing you could do about anything, so you just lived day to day and did your job. Something could happen any time. You never talked about it. We acted like it was normal.”

WW2 made the United States a superpower, but at what price?

You’d expect Ken Burns’s 16-hour PBS mega-documentary, The War (shown in seven installments beginning this Sunday, September 23, at 8 pm on Channel 2), which fixates on the personal wartime experiences of US combat troops who waged the Allied campaigns against Germany and Japan, to make up for vets’ remarkable lack of insightful reminisces about World War II.

It does and it doesn’t.

Through extensive (and extensively edited) interviews with articulate and carefully selected veterans, who happened to take part in most of the war’s major events, and their families, The War does offer fresh, and very human, insights into how awful the experience really was. But also it’s clear that for individual servicemen, WW2’s on-the-ground context was narrow and mystifying. Incredible events took place — victories, defeats, hardships, and blunders — that are now understood in big-picture perspective but that were experienced, and are often recalled, as isolated triumphs and terrors.

By the end of the series, the interview subjects’ increasingly grim personal pictures of the fabled crusade for democracy no longer match the sometimes glib bravado of the film’s narration. It’s as if there had been two wars — one for public consumption (positive and patriotic) and one that was an experience of the soul (puzzling and private).

Production quality is high throughout. The War serves up tons of unfamiliar combat footage — color and black-and-white — and still photos from the homefront and behind the lines. The vintage film is beautifully digitally enhanced, and the battle sequences are artfully dubbed with realistic battle-sound effects — which transform these otherwise chaotic, hard-to-follow scenes into emotion-packed, if slightly dishonest, faux action-movie sequences.

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